White Dice is happy to current Continuum, painter Minoru Nomata’s debut solo exhibition in London, titled after the artist’s latest sequence of the identical identify. Characterised by a scarcity of human presence, his works depict imaginary architectural constructions and enigmatic landscapes that transcend time and place. Conjuring an unfamiliar world that’s nonetheless tethered to actuality, his visionary work evoke a disquieting sense of alienation. ‘Lack, deficiency, insecurity, isolation and the unknown – these so-called unfavourable emotions will also be a inventive set off for me to create one thing’, the artist has mentioned.
Over the previous 4 a long time, Nomata has developed a hybrid architectural language that fuses the commercial, fantastical, archaic and futuristic. The place to begin of the artist – who sees ‘imaginary structure’ as a visible language in its personal proper – is in Tokyo the place he spent his childhood. In a business and industrial space the place city factories and historically designed housing coexist, he turned desirous about a lexicon of structural components akin to chimneys and metal towers. Particularly in Tokyo within the mid-Sixties, city growth was actively carried out earlier than the Olympics, and with expectations for a brand new metropolis raised excessive within the building of Tokyo Tower, Nomata appeared to entry a glimpse of the long run.
Rendered with meticulous precision, his scenes usually characteristic towering edifices, intricate skeletal frameworks, spherical varieties or wind-powered equipment. The distinctive color palette that Nomata employs is muted and atmospheric – shades of stone-grey, white and sepia interspersed with subdued blues and greens – which boosts the dreamlike high quality of his constructed realms. The artist’s use of a comparatively flat type and shallow depth of subject additional enforces this impression of the constructed world, a dimension of which is the theatrical. Bathed in a centered, directional gentle, constructions akin to these in Continuum-1 (2024) come to resemble items on a stage set towards simulated backdrops of hazy cloud and sky formations.
Nomata likens his course of to ‘daydreaming in an woke up state of actuality’; his work should not wholly Surrealist, nor can they be described as acts of pure creativeness. Because the artist has acknowledged, ‘I’ve seen what was there already. I don’t really feel like I’ve constructed it, I have a look at it’. Although the pervading environment of the works is broadly impressed by science fiction, Nomata has cited the writings of Philip Okay. Dick, and the music of Brian Eno and Erik Satie as explicit sources of inspiration. When working, the artist makes use of music to ‘amplify’ his imagery, enabling him to ‘think about one thing wider, deeper, and extra lasting’. The artist attracts from a private archive of over fifty scrapbooks, that are crammed with pictures culled from magazines and newspapers, in addition to tv programmes that target historical past, arithmetic and astrophysics. Starting by creating sketches from this materials, he then transforms these over months, years and even a long time. The syncretic visible language that outcomes attracts upon art-historical references as wide-ranging as Greek and Roman structure, the early works of Henri Rousseau, the visible kinetics of Op Artwork, the machine-age aesthetic of the American Precisionist painter Charles Sheeler and the visions of Giorgio de Chirico and René Magritte.
In Nomata’s ‘Continuum’ sequence, solitary constructions come up from low horizon traces, erupting in direction of the sky. Though many of those may be recognized as ‘buildings’, their perform and who they serve stays elusive. Continuum-5 (2023), for instance, reveals a glass tower set towards a smoggy night time sky, recalling the huge iron and glass constructions designed for Nineteenth-century World’s Festivals – such because the Crystal Palace in London – however right here it’s made unusual by way of elongation and its fruits in a bell-like curve. There are not any obvious entrances or exits, though the helix of paint that circles the inside may point out a staircase, albeit with no clear starting or finish. A colossal tree is erected inside, its progress pressured into the narrowing upwards trajectory of the glasshouse, whereas foliage creeps throughout the outside planes of the constructing. As with lots of Nomata’s works from this sequence, a way of placelessness pervades the scene, which exists someplace between a dystopian future and a mythic previous.
Elsewhere within the exhibition, Nomata turns his consideration from the aerial to the aqueous, depicting large-scale hydrological formations, akin to icebergs, frozen waterfalls and broad vistas of glaciers, as he has completed in Think about-1 (2018). In Continuum-12 (2024), two unnaturally spherical ice plenty are bisected by the ocean’s floor, the one above the water line tapered right into a slight level. The circle motif repeats all through Nomata’s sequence – whether or not as a single, seemingly natural entity in Continuum 19 (2024), as parts within the architectural assemblage of Continuum-3 (2023) or within the immense clear balloons tethered to the bottom in Continuum-6 (2024). In Continuum-21 (2024) Nomata depicts a boat-like building on the water, seemingly pushed by a mixture of hydraulic and aerodynamic tools. In quite a few work, mechanical interventions protrude or interrupt in any other case serene landscapes, as if to position human endeavour in rivalry with the chic drive of nature.
In accordance with the artist, ‘building, restore and demolition’ happen concurrently in his work; they confer, too, upon the simultaneity of previous, current and future distinct to Nomata’s work. As he states, he units out to create worlds that ‘should not “someplace”, however “nowhere”, able that helps [him] discover a place to move for’. Devoid of identifiable temporal or geographical markers as they might be, Nomata’s ambivalent landscapes converse on to humankind’s long-standing existential issues about what place, if any, it has on the planet.
Minoru Nomata (b.1955) lives and works in Tokyo.